Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Teaching and Learning by Discussion

Socratic teaching is the oldest, and still the most powerful, teaching tactic for fostering critical thinking. Socrates is the most influential philosopher of ancient Greece and yet we have nothing left of his work. We know about him and his methods through the works of the works of Plato, the dialogues talk about his life and philosophy, and Xenophon. Socratic dialogue is an argument or series of arguments made using the question-and-answer method employed by Socrates in Plato's Dialogues. Teaching and learning by discussion is a very powerful method to cover a lot of ground. Today we have plenty of... Read more →

Six Characteristics of Deep Innovation Smarts

“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” [Marcel Proust] There's distinction between solving a problem and finding or opening a new opportunity. In some cases we find an opportunity when we solve a problem, but in many more, we open a new opportunity by looking at things differently. So the old saying, if it's not broken it doesn't need fixing may end up holding us back reinforced too many times. In 1991, Stanford University Professor David Kelley, Bill Moggridge, who was a British designer, author and educator, and British designer... Read more →

Why we Read

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.” [Michel de Montaigne] “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut,” says Stephen King. So that's a good starting point—we want to read books, good stories, all kinds of timeless stories. Fiction is where we can learn from some of the masters of the craft, like King. To understand why we read so we can translate that to... Read more →

Universal Principles of Influence

The psychological frame we build around an appeal has as much or more weight on us getting through than the request by itself. Learning how to prepare the ground for what we'll present to take root is an important step toward our message or request sticking. Just like when we paint, if we want better results, we use a primer. Thanks to the success of Influence, many are now familiar with the tactics we can use to increase our odds—reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. We tend to return a favor, when we commit to something... Read more →

Are Men's and Women's Brain Different?

Men and women are physically different, a statement that falls easily in the realm of observable knowledge. It takes 46 chromosomes to create a human being—23 from each parent. Two of them determine whether we become men or women—and at least one of them has to be an X (or we die). We all start life as females for six weeks, then the SRY gene of the Y chromosome develops males. SR is for “sex reversal.” SRY kicks in at week six to cue the formation of testicles. Y can only come from the father. Surely Henry VIII's wives would... Read more →

Most of our Activities require a Combination of Bonding and Bridging

We may be linked with hundreds or even thousands of people in social media, but there's an upper limit of people with whom we can maintain social relationships on a consistent basis—where we know each other and touch base regularly. That number is 150. It's called the Dunbar number# after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar first proposed human's theoretical cognitive limit in the 1990s: “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a... Read more →

Pixar's 22 Rules for Storytelling

Shared on Twitter by former Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats, the rules distill the story basics we of creating a good narrative. It's simple advice worth following given Pixar's impressive record. Its feature films have earned around $10.8 billion at box office worldwide, averaging $634 per film. The company received sixteen Academy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and eleven Grammy Awards. At Pixar, they know what it takes to bring something new to the world. When Brave was released many critics were skeptical—comparing it to past successes like The Incredibles or Ratatouille it didn't feel groundbreaking. Director Mark Andrews and... Read more →

How Thought Tricks us

Civilization used to value thought—it helped us build cities, created science and technology, and contributed greatly to medicine. Everything we see is the product of thought. But a certain way of thinking also produces destruction—when we break things into fragments and take each piece as if it were independent. Like smashing an object into fragments instead of taking it apart to find each part—parts belong to a whole, fragments are arbitrary bits. Thought goes wrong when things that should be together are taken as separate. “There's something we don't understand about how thought works,” says physicist David Bohm in On... Read more →

The Four Motivators that Drive Innovation

There's only so much we can optimize existing structures and resources before we get to the end of our runway. In business as in nature growth comes from innovating. Because it moves us from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance, innovation leads to breakthroughs towards where we want to go even as we may not know how to get here. Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler say the future is better than we think. Which is good news in a cycle of seemingly unending global economic and environmental crises. In Abundance they make the case for why innovation is part... Read more →

Hans Rosling: Seeing and Understanding the Big Picture

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us had their perspectives shifted at the hand of Hans Rosling. He was a Swedish doctor and professor of global health who used his skills as statistician to dispel common myths about the so-called developing world. His quipped that “everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts” is a good reminder that our knowledge needs to turned into data and that it's important to see that “most of our representations arise collectively, and that gives them greater power,” as physicist David Bohm says in On Dialogue. The Latin... Read more →